1. Field
Example embodiments relate to a facial recognition apparatus, method and computer-readable medium with improved security reliability.
2. Description of the Related Art
As society has become more information oriented, importance of information security and identification has increased.
In the past, a key, a password, an ID card, a smart card and the like were used for information security and identification. However, these have poor portability and may be lost. In addition, they may be forged, falsified or surreptitiously used. In order to solve such problems, information security and identification technology using biometrics has been developed.
Biometrics is used to indicate that a portion of the body of a person is recognized to perform identification, and includes fingerprint recognition, iris recognition, voice recognition, signature recognition, facial recognition, and the like. Since biometrics is performed using a portion of the body of the person, biometrics provides excellent convenience and security. Accordingly, research into biometrics has been actively conducted.
Since facial recognition may be performed without spontaneous agreement of an authentication subject, a recognition process is conveniently and easily performed. Thus, development of and research into facial recognition has been actively conducted.
In facial recognition, an image of a person's face is acquired by focusing on the person's face, a face area is extracted from the acquired image using edge and color information, and feature points such as eyes, nose and mouse are extracted from the face area, thereby recognizing the person's face.
At this time, the color and direction of an illumination, various facial expressions, various angles and the like are considered.
Regarding facial recognition, even when an unregistered person uses the portrait photo of a registered person, facial recognition is performed by extracting feature points such as eyes, nose and mouth of a face area from the portrait photo. Therefore, the same result as when recognizing the actual face of the registered person is obtained.
Thus, since facial recognition is performed using only the image of the person, illegal use of the registered person's photo is not prevented.
Since the unregistered person performs identification using the portrait photo of the registered person, information security is not secured. Thus, the reliability of the facial recognition used for information security and identification is low.